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Friday, January 12, 2018

"Fandom is a personal book. . ."

The publisher asked me to write a post for their blog about my book on fandom. They posted it this morning, but, as is their prerogative, they'd cut it by half. .

That's OK--the original post is long and chatty--but they sanitized it too. Fandom ends up sounding too much like a social crusade. There is that side of it, and it's a big one, but the publisher took out my paragraph about characters hooking up---and "shipping" (creating relationships among characters) is even a bigger side of fandom..

Ah well, that blog is for publishing professionals. Pleasegod no one much else will see it. I'm posting here what I originally wrote. I've said all this before, but it was fun to sit down and write it out, now the book is behind me.

My original, unedited post:

Fandom
is a personal book for me, and the first book I've written for this publisher
that is entirely my own. Always before, I've written on someone else's choice of topic, from Algeria to Zimbabwe.

I began researching this book back in the 1970s, when, every day after school, I watched Star Trek reruns in syndication on my family's black and white TV. (Syndication--I had to define that in the book.) Of course I mean Star Trek: TOS––The Original Series. There are seven Trek series now with the latest, Star Trek:Discovery airing.

The
show was
incredibly important to me––I felt weird and ugly
in a new school, my family was falling apart, the president of the
United States was clearly unfit to serve, the country was in a seemingly
unending and unwinnable war (just the one, though)––and here was
this crew, this all-species [not just human] crew of both genders [only
two throughout the universe, according to the show] that said another
world, another way, is possible. Get on board..

Star Trek
implied that things on Earth would get worse before we got to their,
the 23rd, century. In some arenas, that seems to be the case so far. In
fandom, however, things have gotten better. While I had almost no one to
share my fan love, art, and ideas with, teens now can share online
their passion for the stories they love.

Of course there are problems with online fandom
…because humans. The 1970s had problems too. For me, isolation was the
big one. Entering the fray can be scary, and possibly dangerous, but so
is silence.

A
couple years ago, in 2016, I noticed that while fans are all over the
internet, there were few printed books on the phenomenon of fandom. I
pitched the idea of a book that would take a look at some of
the many ways fans actively participate in the media they love. I took on fan-made writing (fic), videos (vids), games,
visual arts, and cosplay. Trying to fit all that into 100 pages ended up
feeling, as Bilbo says in Lord of the Rings, "sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."

I
decided to focus on a couple main ingredients. One was history. Fan
writing comes in for a lot of derision. It's true, a lot of it is
painfully bad. So is a lot of printed work. (Dan Brown, I'm looking at
you.) I wanted to show that fan writing is not some anomaly: humans have
always, always riffed on one another's stories.

If
you look at the history of literature, it's a bunch of magpies
borrowing shiny bits for their own use. Virgil lifted his hero Aeneas
from Homer's Illiad. Jane Austen got her start as a teenager writing
parodies of the romance novels of her day--like our Harlequins. As the
British Library says, virtually none of Shakespeare's plots were original. (Of
course, lifting a good idea is just the beginning--you have to be able
to run with it.) Fifty Shades of Grey, which started online as adult erotic fic based on the teen vampire Twilight romances, is nothing new.

The
other ingredient was fans' passion for things to be better. We don't
always agree on what better would look like (ha! not at all), but,
mostly, we want it.

OK--today,
fans want Wonder Woman and Captain Kirk to hook up (that's a new one on
me). * We (still) want Captain Kirk and Spock to, too. (Star Trek is the
mother ship of a kind of fic called slash, that romantically pairs
same-sex characters.) And so forth, and so on.

Fandom
envisions a better social world too, one with less barriers of every
kind. I start the book with the fan-love for the musical play Hamilton
as an example of a virtuous cycle: fans love that the actors are people
of color and women play a prominent role. But it was fandom's ongoing
call for and support of work like this that helped bring about a world
where creator Lin-Manuel Miranda's work can make it to Broadway, and
beyond. And where Black Panther and is not just a background character,
and Wonder Woman isn't just "the other one" in the DC pantheon.

In many
ways, these mass media stories are inheritors of Star Trek (and other) fandom's vision of, as fans say, a sandbox where everybody gets to play.

To wrap up, an example of how I participated in one tiny way in that vision.

For
some fans, Fandom Is a Way of Life. I am not one of those fans. By
2008, it'd been a couple decades since I'd even thought about Star Trek.
Life was rough that winter though--specifically, I was reeling from my
mother's suicide.

I idly googled "Star Trek." My word, the fandom...!

I entered the fray. I made an autobiographical vid: screenshots from Star Trek subtitled with my story of being a sad teenager,
and then a (at that time) sad adult, and how the example of Kirk and
Spock––a sort of yin/yang pair of personalities––had and did inspire and
comfort me.(YouTube took it down after a few
years. Copyright law
and Fair Use--it's a thorny thicket the book just brushes lightly.)

YouTube comments are famous
for calling forth the sludge of humanity, but my vid got nothing but
love. A lot of people let me know they felt the same. "It's true, Star
Trek saves lives," one wrote.

That summer, I got a message on youTube from a fan in Moscow, Captain J. L. of the Russian Star Trek Club. She wrote, "It's wonderful that people on the other side of the planet
feel the same way." Would I be willing to re-subtitle the vid in Russian, to be shown at the 2009 RusCON, the Russian
Star Trek convention?

We
worked together to translate it. There were some funny glitches. What
did I mean, "Spock seemed like a pill"? And, did you know, "Bluetooth"
in Russian is "Bluetooth"? I'd put that in as a reference to Star Trek's
prescient wireless technology.

The captain also asked me to write a letter she would translate ad read at Ruscon. The letter I wrote concludes, "Star
Trek has been right in its predictions about technology and a lot of
other things. But I hope it will be wrong about one: I hope we
won't half-destroy ourselves before we finally get our act together. Thanks to Capt. J. L. for translating
the video. Our work together gives me hope that Star Trek was right
about humanity's peaceful future."

Russia,
presidential politics, social justice, personal sorrow, lust, and love,
and plain old fun!---fandom has enough butter for all the bread.
Writing this book allowed me to spend a lot of time with young fans,
online and in personal interviews. They and their creativity and love
for stories, for romance, justice, community have given me hope. I hope
they (and we) take that hope and, as Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation says, make it so.

________________________

* After I wrote this, I realized that in the 2017 movie Wonder Woman, Chris Pine plays the love interest, Steve Trevor. Pine also plays Capt. Kirk in the reboot Trek movies (2009– ). That didn't immediately occur to me because, in my eyes, Captain Kirk has and always shall be William Shatner.

MICHAEL: I know! It is! Thank you, yes, the Russian fan working with me IS the best of the Internet, and the best of fandom, and it's one of my proudest achievements in my life too.

But no, they cut it. I cannot fathom---it's the best story. And it's so topical too, with Russia-US relations. What can I say?

BINK: Thank you! I was pleased it came together so quickly (though now I reread it, I see my sentences could use some untangling)--but the story is there, the way I wanted it. I'm especially glad to hear that it's fun to read!

My Movies

Quote of the Moment

“We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it’s really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.”